West Side Story

Tony and Maria are a 20th century Romeo and Juliet, and the Sharks and the Jets are the Capulets and the Montagues of New York's West Side. The 1957 Broadway production and its subsequent movie adaptation transformed West Side Story into an audio-visual reference point. Bernstein's music, which describes the action and the tragic events, is one of his most popular compositions. Its symphonic dances immediately take us back to 1950s Manhattan.
Guinovart offers us a work for marimba and band, originally written for carillon and band, with a highly original sound inspired by three very different looking paintings in German Romanticist, Venetian Renaissance, and French Surrealist style. The work that opens the programme, by composer Joni Greene, is dedicated to Blake Brockington, a young transsexual and LGTBI activist who committed suicide in 2015. The score was a commission by the band where Brockington played the euphonium.